By Category: Life

“Those who fear death most are those who enjoy life least.”

-Edward Abbey

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“It only happened in novels or movies that summer was filled with dazzling sun. What existed in reality were humble, small-town Sundays...a man taking his snooze under the political columns of a newspaper, enveloped in gunsmoke...canned juices and thermos jugs with magnetized caps...boats for hire, fifty cents an hour - queue up here...foaming beaches with the leaden scum of dead fish...and then, at the end, a jam-packed trolley rickety with fatigue. Everyone knows this is fact, but no one wants to make a fool of himself and be taken in; so, on the gray canvas of reality, he zestfully sketches the mere form of this illusory festival. Miserable, unshaven fathers, shaking their complaining children by the shoulders trying to make them say it has been a pleasant Sunday...little scenes everyone has seen in the corner of some trolley...people's pathetic jealousy and impatience with others' happiness.”

-The Woman In The Dunes, Kobo Abe

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“Life dries cold beneath the dead soul lights
When death sleeps, it dreams of you.”

-Dead Girl, Acid Bath

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“Anything that happens happens, anything that in happening causes something else to happen causes something else to happen, and anything that in happening causes itself to happen again, happens again. Although not necessarily in chronological order.”

-The Salmon of Doubt, Douglas Adams

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“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.”

-Stella Adler

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“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”

-The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom

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“Thus the unfamiliar, the outré, the monstrous, became familiarized - a kind of joke, a child's bogeyman, a cultural reference. 'Ordinary life' is an obsessive habit: something which must continue, even in the midst of war or catastrophe. Women in cities devastated by earthquake, their houses in ruin, still peg out their washing to dry in the sun.”

-The Eye Opener, Brian Aldiss

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“Sometimes in my fantasies, the kind that hit you in broad daylight, riding the subway, I have imagined being a dutiful wife, my life perfect as a bud opening in the cool monsoon winds, then blossoming on its stalk on the gulmohar tree, petals dark red, falling onto the rich soil outside my mother's house in Tiruvella. In the inner life coiled within me, I have sometimes longed to be a bud on a tree, blooming in due season, the tree trunk well rooted in a sweet, perpetual place. But everything I think of is filled with ghosts, even this longing. This imagined past--what never was--is a choke hold.”

-Fault Lines, Meena Alexander

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“Midway upon the road of our life I found myself within a dark wood, for the right way had been missed.”

-Inferno, Dante Alighieri

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“(In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova.)

In that part of the book of my memory before which little can be read, there is a heading, which says: 'Incipit vita nova: Here begins the new life'.”

-La Vita Nuova, Dante Alighieri

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“Then, it's Sem-Pernas's turn [to go on the merry-go-round]. He's silent, a weird emotion takes over. He walks over like a religious man goes to church, like a lover to the bosom of his loved one, like a suicidal person to death. He walks over pale and limping. He rides a blue horse that has stars painted on its wooden leg. His lips are tight, his ears don't hear the song that's playing. He can only see the lights that turn with him and he attaches himself to the certainty that he's in a merry-go-round, turning round and round in a horse like all those boys who have mothers and fathers, and a house, and someone to kiss them, someone to love them. He thinks he is one of these boys and closes his eyes to guard better this certainty. He can't see the policemen that beat him, the man in the jacket that laughed. (...) Sem-Pernas holds on tight to his horse. It's as if he ran over an ocean of stars, in the most marvelous journey of the world. A journey like the one Professor had never read or invented. His heart beats so much, so much, that he holds it in his hand.”

-Capitães da Areia, Jorge Amado

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“'You're a twisted fuck.'
'No, I'm just an ordinary guy with nothing to lose.'”

-American Beauty [movie]

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“I had always heard that your entire life flashes before your eyes the second before you die. Only that one second isn't a second at all, it seems to stretch out forever like an ocean of time. For me it was lying on my back at boy scout camp, watching falling stars. And the maple trees that line our street. Or my grandmother's hands, and how her skin seemed like paper. And the first time I saw my cousin Tony's brand new Firebird. And Janey. And my last thought was of Carolyn. I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it's hard to be angry when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes, I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and I can't take it. My heart swells up like a balloon that's about to burst. But then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold onto it. And then, it flows through me like rain and I feel nothing but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life. You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry. You will someday.”

-American Beauty [movie]

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“Has anything you've done made your life better?”

-American History X [movie]

Recommended by Alyssa.

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“Why bother trying? What's the point? So I could go to some suck-ass college, get a diploma, march out into a job I hated, marry a pretty girl who would want to divorce me, but then she wouldn't because we'd have kids, so instead she'd become the angry woman on the other end of the kitchen table, and the kids would grow up watching this, until one day I'd look at my son and he'd look just like the face in the bathroom mirror?

If that was life, then it was twisted.”

-Twisted, Laurie Halse Anderson

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“Death is a beautiful thing... I will do my part...Then I'll just go. Just go.”

-Fela Anikulapo-Kuti

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“Conformity is suicide. Imitation is Suicide. Love is Suicide. Suicide is self-expression.

'Suicide - The most sincere form of self criticism'
Plato said that under certain circumstances suicide can be justified. These included extra ordinary sorrow, unavoidable misfortune, intolerable disgrace...

Too bad, Life is the slowest form of Suicide”

-Anonymous

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“Enjoy life. There's plenty of time to be dead.”

-Anonymous

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“Every Saturday night we should stay home and watch films because rewind on the remote of life does not work.”

-Anonymous

Recommended by Kat.

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“Life is like a bad dream
The only difference is you don't feel happy to wake up.”

-Anonymous

Recommended by Ginger.

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“Life is like a bed of nails, it hurts no matter where you step.”

-Anonymous

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“Life will die, why prolong the torture by living?”

-Anonymous

Recommended by Michael.

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“So live that you can look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell.”

-Anonymous

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“Walking across the thin ice of my dreams, Fearing the cold waters of reality beneath me. Yet onward I tred.”

-Anonymous

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“There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.”

-Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society, Antonin Artaud

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